Primitive modernity: H. G. Wells and the prehistoric man of the 1890s.

Pearson, Richard

ABSTRACT

This essay places H. G. Wells in the context of the anthropological and sociological investigations into the origins of man that received great impetus in the late nineteenth century from archaeological finds and ethnographic studies. His knowledge of the work of Edward Clodd on primitive, prehistoric man informs his notion of human intellectual development and evolution. Wells saw himself as a sociologist, but regarded this field as essentially a creative rather than scientific one. Modernity, for Wells, came to require an acceptance of the tensions between relatively recent civilized codes of behaviour and an inherited primitive instinct.

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This essay is an attempt to come to terms with Wells's anthropological and sociological thinking in the 1890s, and to see this as part of a cultural formation that says much about the transition from Victorian to modern(ist) society. Most readings of Wells in the 1890s tend to foreground his scientific and prophetic writings, and the scientific discourse in his work. Many of his novels and short stories deal with the potential disasters of an unregulated modern science (stolen bacteria, crashing aeroplanes), and a society in transition through the discovery or invention of new technologies. I am arguing, however, for the importance of his sense of culture, and that his connections with the emerging discipline of sociology place his work in a grey area between literature and science, just as that discipline found itself so placed. Indeed, Wells fought a long battle in the press against those who called themselves 'scientific sociologists': Herbert Spencer, Benjamin Kidd, and J. B. Crozier (Wells sought a chair of sociology for himself in the period around 1904). (1) He saw his brand of sociology as related to utopianism; the work of Comte, Spencer, Kidd, and Crozier, he said, were interesting intellectual experiments of extraordinary little permanent value, and the proper method of approach to sociological questions is the old, various and literary way, the Utopian way, of Plato, of More, of Bacon, and not the nineteenth century pneumatic style, nor by its constant invocation to biology and 'scientific' history and its incessant unjustifiable pretension to exactitude and progress. (2)

Wells's 'sociological' fictions are mostly rooted in modern-day Victorian England, and never permit the sociologist-author himself to step outside of his own frame of reference. I am always fond of pointing out to students that it is the Psychologist in Wells's Time Machine who presses the little lever on the model and sends it into the future; Wells's future is in fact an analysis of the identity of modern-day man, who, like Graham in When the Sleeper Wakes, is the real constructor or originator of this future.

Wells always rejected the Spencerian promotion of progress for the more Darwinan cocktail of chance, coincidence, and contingency. As Roslynn Haynes notes in a reading of The Island of Dr. Moreau, Wells bases his system of natural evolution on Darwin's trinity of chance, waste, and pain, the workings of nature being seen as without design, 'careless of the type', and inducing suffering in those creatures unfit or unable in the struggle for survival. (3) This recognition, indeed, suffuses Anticipations, Wells's sociological analysis of modern society, a book often recently condemned for what is seen as a Wellsian argument for a eugenic solution to the problems of the working-classes. However, the book needs to be seen as the culmination of his 1890s researches into primitivism, which led him to a recognition that culture needs to be planned in order to offset the painful workings of instinct and nature. (Wells was pleased to receive a letter from Sidney Low suggesting that Anticipations was better than Kidd's Social Evolution (1894), to which Wells responded mischievously, 'I could eat Kidd'. (4)) The utopian or imaginative sociology of Wells appears to argue for a more cautious relationship between the sociologist and his subject: that in some ways it is the onlooker, the sociologist, who has the most to learn and benefit from any analysis of the Other. Wells retains a literariness in his scientific thinking that complicated, or even confused, his evolutionary thinking. In the mid- to late 1890s, as part of a group of writers and thinkers that included Grant Allen, Edward Clodd, and George Gissing, and through correspondence with the emerging novelist Joseph Conrad, Wells found himself drawn into debates that embraced new thinking around the origins of man, prehistory, primitivism and savagery, ritual and cultural survivals, and the new evolution of man, which itself established a scientific opposition to the Church.

The relationship between Wells and Clodd repays some discussion for what it can tell us of an aspect of Wells's work that is much neglected: his understanding of and imaginative engagement with the primitive past. Anthropology in the 1890s was a booming subject, and closely linked to the exciting discoveries in archaeology and the popularity for new collections of ethnographical artefacts in museums. Following the lead of Edward Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871), in order to understand the position and character of late Victorian culture, researchers travelled the globe to study primitive 'untouched' civilizations. They were closely followed by the novelists who wanted to capture something of the spirit of adventure in such explorations: Rider Haggard, for instance, went as far as Mexico to discuss Aztec culture with J. Gladwyn Jebb before writing Montezuma's Daughter (1893). In a similar way, Grant Allen translated James Frazer's ideas in The Golden Bough (1890) into novelistic form in works like The Great Taboo (1890); and painters like Gauguin began to consider the aesthetic interest of Pacific primitivism. All of this occurred as Wells was beginning to contemplate a future in writing, at the beginning of the 1890s. The interest of all of these writers in the concept of taboo is particularly important, reflected in Wells, for example, in the Eloi's fear of the wells with towers and their fear of the dark, a concept he describes in 'A Story of the Stone Age' as primitive and instinctual.

Alongside this anthropology and the studies of primitive mythologies came the work on primitive man and the archaeological excavations in Europe and England in search of Hominid fossils and remains. The most significant publication in this field in England was probably Sir John Lubbock's Prehistoric Times of 1865 (with revised editions in 1869, 1872, 1878, and 1890), but in the mid-1890s a series of books appeared making the subject accessible to the intelligent general reader. Wells recalled something of this period in 'The Grisly Folk and their War with Men' (Storyteller Magazine, April 1921): 'Can these bones live?'

Could anything be more dead, more mute and inexpressive to the inexpert eye than the ochreous fragments of bone and the fractured lumps of flint that constitute the first traces of something human in the world? We see them in the museum cases, sorted out in accordance with principles we do not understand, labeled with strange names. Chellean, Mousterian, Solutrian and the like [...] Most of us stare through the glass at them, wonder vaguely for a moment at that half-savage, half-animal past of our race, and pass on. 'Primitive man,' we say. 'Flint implements. The mammoth used to chase him.' [...] there are the soundest reasons for believing that these earlier so-called men were not of our blood, not our ancestors, but a strange and vanished animal, like us, akin to us, but different from us [...] Flint and bone implements are found in deposits of very considerable antiquity; some in our museums may be a million years old or more, but the traces of really human creatures, mentally and anatomically like ourselves, do not go back much earlier than twenty or thirty thousand years ago. True men appeared in Europe then, and we do not know from whence they came [...]. (5)

Wells here gives three examples of early Stone Age man from the Lower, Middle, and Upper Palaeolithic periods: Homo erectus, Neanderthal, and Homo sapiens, thus displaying his knowledge of the subject. He also tells us that the 'grisly folk' as he calls them, the Homo erectus, Chellean, larger hominids who made huge stone implements, 'passed away before the faces of the true men'; they were displaced and died out by the arrival of the Solutrians, the Homo sapiens. But his most important contribution is the imaginative and creative reconstruction of primitive times that the story unfolds for the reader, and how this in turn forces a reconsideration of modern man's right to the epithet 'civilized'. 'Can these bones live?': from the glass cases of the museums Wells transforms the lifeless bones into flesh and blood humans whose very existence and thought patterns demonstrate (in Wells's interpretations) their connections with modernity.

Culturally, in the mid-1890s, prehistoric man and concepts of primitivism became bound up with notions of the place of science in society, the development of man, human intellect, and modern consciousness and identity. Edward Clodd, whom Wells knew from social gatherings at Clodd's Strafford House and from invitations to attend dinners at the Omar Khayyam Club (where Clodd was President and Allen a member), was a wealthy Victorian banker who became a leading writer on social evolution and the origins of man. The Story of Creation: A Plain Account of Evolution (1887), despite its provoking title, was a survey of evolutionary thought and application that sought to explain the mechanisms of human society to a general readership. As his biographer Joseph McCabe described it, the book, which sold 2000 copies in a fortnight and 5000 in three months, was 'a model of the presentation of science to thoughtful but inexpert readers'. (6) This approach would have undoubtedly appealed to Wells, as a novelist intent on popularizing new scientific ideas; and, given the closeness of the two men, it would be surprising if Wells did not know Clodd's work. In 1895 Clodd published The Story of 'Primitive' Man in George Newnes's 'Library of Useful Stories' series. (7) This compact volume became a popular seller through the 1890s and was reprinted several times up to 1909. He followed this with The Pioneers of Evolution (1896), which was read by Meredith and Gladstone (the latter disapproving of what he saw as its anti-Catholicism), (8) and Tom Tit Tot: An Essay on Savage Philosophy in Folklore (1898).

These texts formed part of a sudden general cultural interest in prehistoric man. The popularity of the topic can be found even in the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, ever alert to the currents of the day, who published two poems on the subject in 1894-95: 'In the Neolithic Age' and 'The Story of Ung'. Kipling's poems offer a comic intervention in the imaginative rendering of prehistoric man. The first uses first-person monologues to recreate the modes of thought of a primitive man, whose problems and cultures sound distinctly modern. The voice of the 1895 'In the Neolithic Age' was 'singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of Man'; but as the poem unfolds the singer's primitive barbarity becomes apparent, in a comic tone that mirrors the Barrack-Room Ballads of contemporary soldiers:

 But a rival of Solutre, told my tribe my style was outre--
 'Neath a tomahawk, of diorite, he fell.

 And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged, below the heart
 Of a mammothistic etcher at Grenelle.

 Then I stripped them, scalp from skull, and my hunting-dogs fed full,
 And their teeth I threaded neatly on a thong;

 And I wiped my mouth and said, 'It is well that they are dead,
 For I know my work is right and theirs is wrong.' (9)

When the prehistoric singer emerges thousands of years later as a relic of the past, he becomes the subject of a poem by 'a minor poet certified by Traill' (H. D. Traill, the magazine critic). He finds that the world, however, is still the same--'Still a cultured Christian age sees us scuffle, squeak, and rage, | Still we pinch and slap and jabber, scratch and dirk [...]' (p. 355). Kipling reflects the argument also propounded by Wells at this time that humanity has evolved little since primitive times, despite the modernity of the age. 'The Story of Ung' similarly provides a humorous analogy to modern times, describing another prehistoric artist, a man who fashions images in snow and etches pictures of animals and hunters on bone. Having bewitched his tribe, the man suddenly finds the tribe doubting the truth of his images; appealing to his father for help, he is told, 'If they could see as thou seest they would do what thou hast done, | And each man would make him a picture, and--what would become of my son?'. The artist has benefited from the gifts the tribe has brought him and cannot be anything other than pleased that 'thy Tribe is blind'. 'Straight on the glittering ice-field, by the caves of the lost Dordogne' the prehistoric artist whistles and sings as he goes back to scribing his 'mammoth editions' (pp. 358-59). Kipling's poems not only demonstrate the pervasive cultural impact of their contemporaries' writings on primitive man, but they reflect how far the debates themselves had permeated modern thought. Kipling uses the subject matter to make contemporary points, scattering the poems with references (such as Solutre and the caves of the Dordogne) that his readers would understand, and accepting fully the concept of prehistory talking back to the present.

Edward Clodd's The Story of 'Primitive' Man provides the academic context for the mid-1890s debate, the inverted commas of the title revealing Clodd's own scepticism about the designation of primitivism as necessarily below or supplanted by a civilized modernity. The book establishes a narrative of evolution that suggests man's arrival in the area around the Thames, traced in works like Sir John Evans's Ancient Stone Implements (1872), as 'drift-men' and gradually settling in natural dwelling spaces as 'cave-men', 'a somewhat higher state of culture'. (10) He focuses a lot on the most basic developments of man, such as the production of fire and basic tools, and considers the cultural 'survivals' that still govern habits and rituals in the modern age: 'All our pleasures and our pastimes are the outcome of primitive instincts and primitive practices' (p. 37). The mind of the Stone Age man is also considered, particularly his ability to develop new ideas through thought:

such ideas as things around suggested to his twilight mind were a tangle of confusion, contradiction, and bewilderment [...] he dimly noted the difference, which, in the long run, lead the mind to comparisons, and thereby lay the foundation of knowledge--of the relation between things which we will call cause and effect. (p. 66)

This process is set against a sketch of the life and culture of such early peoples--the animals they lived alongside, the society they formed. 'Clodd had the rare faculty, for such works, of visualizing the past and making helpful suggestions of his own', McCabe notes in his biography. (11) It is this concentration on the gradual development of the mental faculties of man that Wells picks up for his 'Story of the Stone Age'. As described below, Wells's story is almost an imaginative reconstruction of the details in Clodd's more scientific work. Like the shift from Victorian to Modern that confronted Wells and Clodd themselves, their depictions of primitive man show the processes of shifts in cultural paradigms as linked to intellectual advancement, based on 'cause and effect'. According to Clodd, primitive man, '"thinking without knowing what he thought," [...] was picking up knowledge for the advantage of all who came after him' (p. 67).

Wells appeared alongside Clodd in Morley Roberts's biography of Gissing, The Private Life of Henry Maitland (1912), as 'G. H. Rivers' (perhaps an allusion to Pitt-Rivers to indicate Wells's interest in museum enthnography) to Clodd's 'Edmund Roden'. Wells also included a comic sketch of Clodd as Edwin Dodd in Boon (1915):

Dodd is a leading man of the Rationalist Press Association, a militant Agnostic, and a dear compact man, one of those Middle Victorians who go about with a preoccupied carking air, as though, after having been at great cost and pains to banish God from the universe, they were resolved not to permit Him back on any terms whatever. He has constituted himself a sort of alert customs officer of a materialistic age, saying suspiciously 'Here, now, what is this rapping under the table here?' and examining every proposition to see that the Creator hasn't ben smuggled back under some specious generalization. Boon used to declare that every night Dodd looked under his bed for the Deity and slept with a large revolver under his pillow for fear of a revelation. (12)

McCabe notes the good-humoured arguments of the men at Strafford House in the 1890s, where Wells once drew a caricature of 'God writing a book to prove that no such person as Edward Clodd existed'. (13) It is also evident from the letters dating to 1902 between himself and George Gissing that Clodd published in his Memories (1916) that the group analysed and discussed each others' latest writings. Gissing wrote to Clodd on 1 March 1902:

Oddly enough, I have just been writing to Wells with very much the same criticism of his work that you suggest. I have asked him: What do you mean exactly by your 'God' and your 'purpose'? I rather suspect that he means nothing more definite than that reverential hopefulness which is natural to every thoughtful and gentle-hearted man. In his lecture to the Royal Institution he goes, I think, entirely too far, talking about eternal activity of the spirit of man, and defying the threats of material outlook. Well. Well, let us agree that it is very good to acknowledge a great mystery; infinitely better than to use the astounding phrase of Berthelot, 'Le monde n'a plus de mystere.' How to go further than this recognition I know not. That there is some order, some purpose, seems a certainty; my mind, at all events, refuses to grasp an idea of a Universe which means nothing at all. But just as unable am I to accept any of the solutions ever proposed. (14)

By 1921 Wells and Clodd had largely gone their separate ways, and Wells's work had moved towards the more fixed pattern of social reconstruction as reflected in the modern utopias of his twentieth-century writings. The post-war period brought a sombre note into the debates about human progress that posited evolution as neutral at a time when Wells turned ever more towards political solutions. Clodd wrote in the Sunday Times on 11 April 1921, the year that Wells wrote 'The Grisly Folk':

man has remained unchanged since the Stone Age. There is no evidence that our brains are superior to the remarkable Cro-Magnon people [...] And what guarantee have we that our civilization, with all its hideous engines of destruction, will not be added to the vast rubbish heaps which witness to the decline and fall of empires? To-day all the forces of disintegration are in full play. Of moral advance, whereon Mr. Wells's scheme must rest, there is no proof whatever anywhere [...]. (15)

Although 'The Grisly Folk' was written in 1921, the idea it expresses of the replacement of one form of protohuman with another has its counterpart in the fiction of the 1890s. Perhaps Clodd's article reminded Wells of the debates that proliferated in the 1890s about the entwining of primitive and civilized in the human. The concept complicates the simplistic view of evolution as a linear ascent from animal to man, and enables us to reread the early scientific romances and short stories as texts that articulate both a consciousness of change and an anxiety about the transition from one state to another. The Victorian being of futurity, metamorphosing between the Eloi and the Morlock, provided a symbol for the modern age of the fundamentally divided and self-destructive psyche of the new man. And I think I use the term 'man' correctly. Wells, in his 1890s work, is almost wholly concerned with the transition of man, from Victorian to modern, and part of his representation of male identity involves the awkward and alienating relationship with woman.

The transitional being is found in all of Wells's early novels. Griffin, in The Invisible Man, propels himself into his own modernity through the discovery of invisibility, which transforms him into a superhuman figure holding an advantage over his species. This mutation, however, proves the perverse feature of Darwinism and natural selection: its wastage, and the threat of mutation leading only to extinction. But it also demonstrates a second more important aspect of Wells's vision: that natural adaptations are not the only form of 'natural selection'. The power of culture is even greater. Griffin's adaptation is accompanied by a breaking of taboo, by the gradual escalation of his murderous attitudes (killing from cat to human). The killing of Griffin at the end of The Invisible Man is ritualistic: the community reverts to a primitive instinct of self-preservation in order to defend its order and organization. There is no safety for Griffin, who, because of his transgression of taboo, is the hunted of all society. (16) This theme is also present in the other texts: the Morlocks' cannibalism, the aliens' eating of the human, and, more directly, the beast-people's eating of flesh are depicted as deplorable sacrileges.

Thus, human advancement, in Wells's view, is not solely the province of biological evolution, and is not to be seen as a complacent progression towards ever higher civilization. Indeed, the interaction of cultural change and biological change is complex; but for Wells the component of culture is the more significant of the two. Since culture is the province of sociology, and sociology for Wells is not a science, then it is the imaginative engagement with cultural practices and rituals that become crucial for his understanding of the landscape and mindset of modernity.

Wells's short stories of the 1890s offer a new perspective on the position of man in the modern world, and, like his utopias, derive from a sense that present-day modern man must view himself from another space or time in order to fully come to terms with his own modernity. As John Hammond says of the stories: 'they exemplify the fragmentation and doubt characteristic of the break-up of the Victorian age'. (17) 'Aepyornis Island', a short story from the Pall Mall Budget of 13 December 1894 (later collected in The Stolen Bacillus), features a collector for a museum who travels to Madagascar where he discovers the bones and three eggs of a bird, long thought extinct, preserved in a tar-like mud. He is left alone on an island after the revolt of his native helpers, and eats two of the eggs, despite the second one having 'developed'. In his loneliness on the deserted atoll, he cultivates the last egg and hatches it, befriending the small bird inside, whom he calls 'Friday'. They become close companions, but the bird gradually grows to a height of fourteen feet and begins to hunt Butcher, their friendship forgotten. 'I'll admit I felt small to see this blessed fossil lording it there', says Butcher. (18) Eventually, man triumphs; Butcher makes a bolus and flings it around the bird's legs, runs from the sea, and saws through his long neck. Then he sits down and cries. He lets the fish pick the bird, as he cannot bring himself to eat him, and then he gets picked up and sells the bones to a dealer near the British Museum. The story dramatizes the very process of 'making the bones live' outside of their museum cases--the egg/artefact, fossilized and extinct, returns the intellectual collector to a more primitive time and forces his reversion to a hunter seeking only to survive. Scratch the surface of a civilized man, and a primitive, intuitive, ritualistic being is barely concealed. The point was made by Clodd in The Story of 'Primitive' Man:

civilization retains, and, in no small degree, shares his [primitive man's] primitive ideas about his surroundings [...] we have not altered so much as we vainly think; if the civilized part in us is recent, in structure and inherited tendencies we are each of us hundreds of thousands of years old. (19)

Hammond sees 'Aepyornis Island' as a reworking of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, connected to late Victorian anxieties over race (the treatment of native helpers). The narrative, he suggests, brings Butcher to a recognition of his own humanity (the tragedy of killing his 'friend'), and creates a kind of modern-day Ancient Mariner retelling his story to the narrator who passes it on to us (a device Hammond suggests adds to the 'realism' of the piece). (20) However, it is also a story about culture, and the clash of culture and instinct. First, the Crusoe references indicate a difference in Butcher's island--Butcher does not, like Robinson, reconstruct his own modern culture. Instead he removes himself from such influences and focuses all of his attention on the egg and bird. His arrival on the atoll reminds Butcher of Defoe, and he thinks himself on a Boy's Own adventure: a 'finer' and more 'adventurous [...] business' he couldn't imagine (p. 303). But this does not last: 'our little paradise went wrong' (p. 306). It is not the bird's death that upsets Butcher, as Hammond suggests, but his loss of culture--'that place was as monotonous as a book of sermons. I went round finding eatable things and generally thinking; but I tell you I was bored to death before the first day was out' (p. 303).

His solace is the Aepyornis bird, but we are continually reminded that the bird is 'an extinct animal' who should not be there (p. 308), and that he was a good companion 'before he went wrong' (p. 309). The relationship cannot exist in a simultaneous time, and as soon as the bird reaches maturity its instinct to survive takes over. Butcher imagines himself to have been the educator of the bird, and now abuses its ingratitude. But the bird has merely followed its own path of 'development'. The humanizing of it is entirely Butcher's own way of relating to it. The irony of his name is not that he is a 'butcher' and kills the bird, as Hammond suggests, but the opposite. The butcher is a cultural figure, providing meat for our society; but Butcher is driven to kill against his wishes, and cannot eat the meat of the bird. He is forced to reacknowledge his own instinct for survival, and to live in the bird's age of the hunter more than his own. Indeed, this is the final irony of the story--it is not Butcher who gets to reconstruct his own culture like Crusoe, but the Aepyornis bird that undermines the culture of Butcher. The primitive fossil has proved more durable than the modern culture of man.

A second tale of the 1890s that deals with the primitive world is Wells's 'A Story of the Stone Age', published in 1897 in the May-September issues of The Idler and collected in Tales of Space and Time in 1899. It is actually the companion story, in a sense, to the better- known 'A Story of the Days to Come', which follows it in the 1899 volume. But in many ways all of the tales in the short series carry with them a defamiliarizing of perspective: 'The Crystal Egg' contains within it scenes from a Martian landscape; 'The Star' concludes with the 'Martian astronomers' watching the near miss of a comet to the earth and speculating, 'from their own standpoint of course', on the little visible damage it caused to the earth (p. 729). The titles 'A Story of the Stone Age' and 'A Story of the Days to Come' are clearly linked to the popularity of 'stories' that provide scientific information, as in Newnes's Library of Useful Stories series, and Kipling's 'Story of Ung'. They indicate a packaging of science in consumable, narrative form. The tale appears very unlike Wells: a man of the future, of prophesy, writing about prehistoric man? But it tells us a lot about Wells's view of evolution and the development of social culture. Again, it says more about the late Victorian period than it does about 50,000 BC, not least because, like the Time Machine's imagined territory of the future, Wells has to make a huge leap of the imagination to take the (Victorian) reader back to Stone Age man. The story is about change, and it indicates how we might argue that change for Wells might be seen as an intertwining of psychology and technology. In the case of the evolving of man, Wells suggests that a combination of chance, genius/imagination, cultural adaptation, and biological prowess determines the future of the human race. The story tells of a conflict (over a woman) within a prehistoric tribe, where Uya the Cunning, the tribal leader, wishes to possess Eudena, a young girl. She flees under the protection of her lover, Ugh-lomi, who fights Uya with the precious firestone, thus breaking a tribal taboo. The young couple are chased by the group, which is intent on killing (and eating) them. Their escape is followed by Ugh-lomi's gradual discovery of technologies beyond those of the tribe: first, how to make an axe, and then horse riding. He slays Uya, rescues a captured Eudena, and defeats most of the tribe in a frenzied battle. He becomes the lord of the rest:

He called manfully to her to follow him and turned back, striding, with the club swinging in his hand, towards the squatting-place, as if he had never left the tribe; and she ceased her weeping and followed quickly as a woman should [...] Thereafter, for many moons Ugh-lomi was master and had his will in peace. And in the fullness of time he was killed and eaten even as Uya had been slain. (pp. 794-95)

There are two central human developments in the story: Ugh-lomi's discovery of the axe-weapon, and the foretelling of man's dominion over animals. Initially, the setting is a harmonious world--man and animal live together--'there was no fear, no rivalry, and no enmity between them' (p. 731). Man has arrived; 'Man was indeed a newcomer to this part of the world in that ancient time, coming slowly along the rivers, generation after generation, from one squatting-place to another, from the south-westward' (p. 748).

Ugh-lomi is described as somehow more thoughtful than the other tribal members. He is shown 'thinking', and then 'novel things began to happen' (p. 757). He defeats a bear, the terror of the beginning of the story; the animals talk in the narrative, complacent about the new arrivals and viewing the humans as aberrations: 'I suppose it's a sort of monkey gone wrong', 'It's a change', 'The advantage he had was merely accidental' (p. 758). But Ugh-lomi has also a sense of his own power, and a constant desire for revenge and domination; he kills the male bear, as he does Uya, this time by rolling a boulder from the cliff top on to the bear below. Later, he captures a horse, again partly by accident and partly by design--and much out of curiosity. Once more, the horses think him a harmless 'pink monkey' (p. 763). 'In the days before Ugh-lomi there was little trouble between the horses and men. And in those days man seemed a harmless thing enough. No whisper of prophetic intelligence told the species of the terrible slavery that was to come' (pp. 761-62). As Ugh-lomi mounts the horse, by jumping from a tree, it bolts away with the primitive man clutching to its back. His ride is like the switch-back of the Time Machine, and he is taken by the experience: 'the exultation grew. It was man's first taste of pace' (p. 767).

At the end of the story, Ugh-lomi has become a man on the verge of his own modernity. He has surpassed his colleagues, and his symbolic function is to demonstrate the change that comes over the first exertion of man's power over his environment and those other creatures within it. This is a sociological change, and not a biological evolution. Ugh-lomi has control of bears and lions (tribal demon figures) and of horses (helpers), and he even exchanges his developed axe for a new club, set with the teeth of the lion/Uya he has killed (having found the benefit of technological invention). And yet he has also been damaged by his achievements. His killing of the lion was done to save a woman, and he remains lame after the fight. Like Lewisham in Love and Mr Lewisham (1899), he is an advanced man, but has been reduced by his desire for female companionship. And Wells's last line--that Ugh-lomi is eventually killed and eaten like his predecessor--creates an evolutionary pattern of slow development, but also a sense of futility. The story is an elegy to man's ancestry. But it is also about instinct, the evolution of man, and the belief that such evolution is at best ambivalent; change does not always imply progress, although it does imply the acquisition of power.

In the year before 'A Story of the Stone Age' Wells wrote an article entitled 'Human Evolution' for the Fortnightly Review (October 1896). (21) This was devised as a response to Kidd's Social Evolution, and aimed to suggest that the notion of 'improvement' was not a result of 'natural selection', but of 'a process new in this world's history', an 'evolution of suggestions and ideas' linked to the developing social body (p. 211). Wells wrote:

there are satisfactory grounds for believing that man (allowing for racial blendings) is still mentally, morally, and physically, what he was during the later Palaeolithic period, that we are, and that the race is likely to remain, for (humanly speaking) a vast period of time, at the level of the Stone Age. (p. 211)

This view of human evolution as essentially static raises questions about our common view of Wells's fiction. Wells clearly had a more sophisticated view of the ecology of evolutionary change than is indicated by the more symbolic usage of the idea in The Time Machine and his other works of the 1890s. Bringing together information about rabbits with that on man, Wells points out how crucial to our understanding of natural selection as the driving mechanism behind evolution is the subject of birth rate and violent death. Man, he points out, passes through five generations each century, as humans are not prepared for breeding until they are well into their teens or beyond. Rabbits, on the other hand, are capable of breeding within six months of birth: thus in a single century rabbits can have passed through two hundred generations.. The rabbit's large litter could also produce adaptations suited to surviving its vulnerable existence, whilst the weak end of the litter dies early and does not breed.

Taking all these points together, and assuming four generations of men to the century--a generous allowance--and ten thousand years as the period of time that has elapsed since man entered upon the age of polished stone, it can scarcely be an exaggeration to say that he has had time only to undergo as much specific modification as the rabbit could get through in a century. (p. 213)

Comparing microscopic bacteria with this, man is static in terms of evolution. Cultural effects are what have changed man: speech and writing, certainly, but--centrally--what Wells called the 'artificial man'. Wells remarks:

That in civilized man we have (1) an inherited factor, the natural man, who is the product of natural selection, the culminating ape, and a type of animal more obstinately unchangeable than any other living creature; and (2) an acquired factor, the artificial man, the highly plastic creature of tradition, suggestion, and reasoned thought. (p. 217)

Civilization and the artificial have, for Wells, developed together, and through this relationship he recognizes the concept of taboo, and that 'what we call Morality becomes the padding of suggested emotional habits necessary to keep the round Palaeolithic savage in the square hole of the civilized state' (p. 217). (22)

This is a significant debate in the 1890s, and was present in various cultural discourses, including race and issues of masculinity. For Wells there is a residual savage state in the individual (and in society) that is only held in check by moral conscience. And yet Wells is not confident, in the fin de siecle times, that such morality will remain stable (we see this in Griffin, Moreau, and the violence released in Butcher), and thus 'Education', he says is the 'careful and systematic manufacture of the artificial factor in man' (p. 217). This is why Wells is not a eugenicist: an ideal social organization, a utopia can be hoped for that will prevent any such social re-creations of the wastage of aggressive natural selection. As Roslynn Haynes states, showing the difference between Huxley and Wells:

whereas Huxley's emphasis on ethics led him at times to mistrust even the intellect when it was divorced from a moral education, Wells came increasingly to place his hope for the future of mankind in intelligence and will as the means of overcoming the chance and cruelty of the evolutionary process. (23)

In the press of the mid-1890s Wells was part of a debate about just exactly what was happening to the human species. In the context of the growing sense of modernity, this is particularly interesting. The relationship between Wells and Grant Allen shows some differences in opinion and literary technique that indicate the gradations and shades of belief around the subject of the primitive. Allen certainly held a strong inclination towards the belief that evolution meant progress and that Western man was the highest current achievement. In the same edition of the Fortnightly Review in which Wells wrote 'Morals and Civilization', his follow-up article to 'Human Evolution', appeared Allen's review of Edward Clodd's Pioneers of Evolution; entitled 'Spencer and Darwin', this review (which immediately preceeded Wells's article) claimed for Darwin only the discovery of natural selection, and for Spencer the ideas of 'Organic Evolution, and of Evolution in General, including Cosmic Evolution, planetary Evolution, Geological Evolution, Organic Evolution, Human Evolution, Psychological Evolution, Sociological Evolution, and Linguistic Evolution, before Darwin had published one word on the subject'. (24) Wells saw that the archaeology of primitive man allowed a window on to a form of humanity that challenged the stifling order of Victorian society. He conceived of the connections between the prehistoric and the contemporary as innate and immediate: 'the inherent possibilities of the modern human child at birth could differ in no material respect from those of the ancestral child at the end of the age of Unpolished Stone'. (25) In what becomes almost an essay on sexual frustration with monogamy, Wells describes morality as 'the padding of suggested emotions and habits, by which the round Palaeolithic man is fitted into the square hole of the civilized state' (p. 221). For him, as for Clodd, the 'Primitive' man has never gone away.

Wells draws upon his knowledge of current anthropological research into contemporary primitive tribes in order to defend his view that man is not so much evolving as biologically static, and changes more particularly under the pressures of civilized forms of society. He raises the issue of sexual morality, and shows how the idea of monogamy is present only to prevent the social disorder that would follow a general polygamy, and that ritualistic taboos help to keep such moral systems in place. During the 1890s the concept of taboo became widely discussed, not just because society itself faced a challenge to traditional Victorian sexual and social mores, but because of the context of work on anthropology and primitive belief systems. Alongside Wells's fiction were the popular novels of another evolutionist, Grant Allen, whose novel The Great Taboo (1890) was based entirely upon James Frazer's Golden Bough (1890), as his Preface makes clear. It describes the arduous experience of a young white couple, Felix and Muriel, washed up from a ship on the shores of a South Pacific island inhabited by cannibals. The relationship between Wells's work and Allen's has been little discussed, and yet the two men were well known to each other and even took cycling holidays together towards the end of the 1890s. Allen's novel The British Barbarians (1895) bears a strong similarity to The Time Machine in a kind of reverse. An 'Alien' from the future twenty-fifth century lands in a small suburb of London and unpicks England's moral follies--its taboos--before falling in love with a married woman. The novel is a comedy attacking social customs of the 1890s, even as far as marriage--the 'sex taboo': 'marriage arises from the stone age practice of felling a woman of another tribe with a blow of one's club, and dragging her off by the hair of her head to one's own cave as a slave and a drudge'. (26) The story bears not only resemblances to the Time Machine, but also to The Wonderful Visit, and it is The British Barbarians that Wells refers to in his essay on 'Morals and Civilization', and reviewed for the magazines.

The narrative of The Great Taboo plays upon the ritualistic structure of the primitive religion, in which a chief God, Tu-Kila-Kila, renews the powers of his tribe by sacrificing on an annual basis outsiders identified as minor deities. Felix and Muriel are made Gods and placed under a taboo: no one can touch them and all must worship them. At the end of their allotted time they will be sacrificed unless they can learn the secret of the taboo and what might counter it. Felix has to steal Tu-Kila-Kila's 'soul' (located in a branch of a tree he guards, like the Golden Bough) and to kill the god in hand-to-hand combat. This he does.

The details of the island life Grant Allen handles quite aesthetically. There are parallels to be drawn between his descriptions of Polynesian life and Gauguin's primitivist paintings being produced at the same time.

The sight was, indeed, a curious and picturesque one. The girls, large-limbed, soft-skinned, and with delicately-rounded figures, sat on the ground, laughing and talking, with their knees crossed under them; their wrists were encinctured with girdles of dark red dracoena leaves, their swelling bosoms half-concealed, half accentuated by hanging necklets of flowers. (27)

But the cannibalism and lack of religion of the islanders is the sticking point for Muriel, and Grant Allen certainly emphasizes the heroism of the civilized combatants and their desire to reform the heathen. Muriel says at the beginning, with trepidation: 'You don't mean to say that islands like these, standing right in the very track of European steamers, are still heathen and cannibal?' (p. 5).

At the end of the novel Allen makes right the defeat of Tu-Kila-Kila by Felix, the 'civilized man', as an inevitable and justified act of the civilized over the savage. Whilst Tu-Kila-Kila fights, foaming at the mouth 'with impotent rage', and rushes on Felix violently, Felix fights 'with the calm skill of a practiced fencer', having learned 'the gentle art of thrust and parry' in 'that civilized school'. When Tu-Kila-Kila pauses for breath, Felix brains him. Unlike the cannibals, however, he feels remorse and values life: 'Felix gazed at the blood-bespattered face remorsefully. It is an awful thing, even in a just quarrel, to feel that you have really taken a human life!' (pp. 251-52). Being now the new God himself, Felix abolishes cannibalism as the natives prepare to eat Tu-Kila-Kila, and announces his intention to return home and bring them Christianity: 'I will send out messengers, very good men, who will tell you of a God more powerful by much than any you ever knew, and very righteous. They will teach you great things you have never dreamed of ' (p. 263). But the natives are not convinced and do not want their gods to leave. Just in time, the British arrive, heavily armed, and take the Europeans back. In an attempt to add a touch of irony at the end of the book, Allen then takes Felix and Muriel to London and Muriel's aunt, who is shocked to find that they have spent weeks alone together on a desert island. Even though they intend to marry, London taboos are still in place.

Allen's novel is significant because it shows just how pervasive were the ideas about primitivism at the time, but also how Allen's simplistic notions of progress and moral order tarnish his thinking with an arrogant complacency. The Great Taboo is a popular rendering of the natural moral order supporting Western civilization. As Allen notes, for him:

Civilization is an attribute of communities; we necessarily leave it behind when we find ourselves isolated among barbarians or savages. But culture is a purely personal and individual possession; we carry it with us wherever we go; and no circumstances of life can ever deprive us of it. (p. 67)

The replacing of the Boupari gods with Christianity shows the damage done to local cultures when invaded by the foreign outsider. As Allen suggests, 'It is an awful thing for any race or nation when its taboos fail all at once and die out entirely [...] Anarchy and chaos might rule' (p. 278).

Wells's work of the 1890s is about man on the cusp of modernity. His work draws upon the scientific schools of Darwinian thought, and upon the current developments in sociology, anthropology, and even archaeology. Through these he imaginatively investigates the wider implications for the mind of modern man. When the Time Traveller ventures into the future, he enters a symbolic realm, much like Moreau's island, or the atoll of the Aepyornis, or, indeed, the primitive landscape of prehistoric Britain. The Time Traveller does not move from his physical location: the garden and the passageways of the future are present in his house of the 1890s, in the link between the laboratory and the dining room. The laboratory space contains both the inner and outer worlds of the future, both the dark world inside the Sphinx and the false paradise of the garden; pulling the machine across from one to the other in the future only moves it across the laboratory in the present. The Time Traveller himself is both the Eloi and the Morlocks. Man does not evolve so quickly that he can leave those instinctive facets behind. The primitive, as Conrad also suggests in his early work, is inside the civilized. Wells reviewed Conrad's An Outcast of the Islands and knew Almayer's Folly, both of which were contemporary with The Time Machine, and both of which deal with the latent violence inside the veneer of respectability, and the Oriental cultural threat to the artificial European moral order. (28) By splitting primitivism and civilization between the Morlocks and the Eloi, Wells plays a game with the reader. The Time Traveller associates himself with the Eloi, he calls them 'human' or near human and feels sympathy for them. He even strikes up his friendship with the androgynous Weena, and sees her as the hope of humanity--symbolized in her white flowers. But it is with the Morlocks that the Time Traveller really has the most association. His repulsion at them, his retreat to Weena are only a denial of what the text makes clear: the Time Traveller contains the primitive, just like the Morlock. He is the labourer, loving machines, the eater of meat, and the violent destroyer of what threatens him. As he stumbles back into the dining room for his dinner, he replicates the movements of the blind and stumbling Morlocks fleeing from the fire he set. His lameness adds to the shambling appearance, his hair is 'greyer', his face 'ghastly pale', like theirs, and he is 'dazzled by the light'. (29) Wells's modern man is actually little more than a confused primitive, and it is this sense of modernity as being beyond humanity that strikes me as central and distinct about Wells's 1890s work. His characters do not stride confidently, like Ugh-lomi, into the future; if they do, like him they vanish and die.

Modernity for Wells is the recognition of the primitive fundamental nature of man, and the feeble artificial character of his civilization. Man's folly, like Almayer's, is to believe that his civilization will save him. Wells's modern man must understand his primitivism, or perish.

(1) Letter to Beatrice Webb, 29 April 1904, in The Correspondence of H. G. Wells, ed. by David C. Smith, 4 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), II, 25.

(2) Letter to the editor of the Fortnightly Review (c. September 1905), in Correspondence of H. G. Wells, II, 79.

(3) Roslynn D. Haynes, H. G. Wells, Discoverer of the Future: The Influence of Science on his Thought (London: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 27-32.

(4) Letter to Sidney Low, 29 June 1902, in Correspondence of H. G. Wells, I, 401.

(5) H. G. Wells, The Short Stories of H. G. Wells (London: Benn, 1927), pp. 677-78. All further quotations from Wells's stories are to this edition and will be given in the text.

(6) Joseph McCabe, Edward Clodd: A Memoir (London: John Lane, 1932), p. 73.

(7) This series, which ran from 1895-1904 and was then collected by Hodder and Stoughton in 1908 as 'The Library of Useful Knowledge', included books on natural history and the development of various aspects of human achievement, all entitled 'The Story of [...]'. Clodd also published The Story of the Alphabet in the series in 1900, and Grant Allen, The Story of the Plants in 1899.

(8) McCabe, pp. 78-79.

(9) The Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling (Ware: Wordsworth, 1994), p. 354. Further references appear in the text.

(10) Edward Clodd, The Story of 'Primitive' Man (London: Newnes, 1909), p. 51; subsequent quotations are from this edition.

(11) McCabe, p. 78.

(12) Cited in McCabe, pp. 130-31.

(13) McCabe, p. 131.

(14) Edward Clodd, Memories (London: Chapman and Hall, 1916), pp. 180-81 (original italics).

(15) McCabe, p. 199.

(16) Brian Murray notes that '[t]he Invisible Man is, in a sense, Huxley's "primitive man," standing for all that Wells would repeatedly condemn': H. G. Wells (New York: Continuum, 1990), p. 94.

(17) J. R. Hammond, H. G. Wells and the Short Story (London: Macmillan, 1992), p. 28.

(18) Short Stories of H. G. Wells, p. 307.

(19) Clodd, Story of 'Primitive' Man, p. 193 (original italics).

(20) Hammond, pp. 60-62.

(21) Reprinted in H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, ed., with critical commentary and notes, by Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), from which subsequent page references are taken.

(22) Peter Kemp, whose book title is taken from this essay, comments that Wells was 'obsessively concerned with the possibility that man may also turn out to be a terminating ape--destroying his own species, unless he can adapt his animal nature to rapidly changing circumstances': H. G.Wells and the Culminating Ape: Biological Themes and Imaginative Obsessions (London: Macmillan, 1982; rev. edn. 1996), p. 5. However, in his early work on prehistoric man, Wells indicates that the instinctive primitivism of man will always be with him; it will not 'adapt'. The Morlocks are the 'civilization' of the future, not the cattle-like Eloi.

(23) Haynes, p. 27.

(24) Grant Allen, 'Darwin and Spencer', Fortnightly Review, 51 (February 1897), p. 261.

(25) 'Morals and Civilization', repr. in H. G. Wells: Early Writings, p. 220.

(26) Grant Allen, The British Barbarians: A Hilltop Novel (London: John Lane, 1895), p. 172.

(27) Grant Allen, The Great Taboo (London: Chatto & Windus, 1890), p. 80; further references are to this edition.

(28) For the relationship between Wells and Conrad see John Batchelor, 'Conrad and Wells at the End of the Century', Critical Review, 38 (1998), 69-82. Wells and Conrad corresponded during this period, after Conrad discovered that Wells wrote the review of his work in 1896. In December 1902 Conrad, Gissing, and Clodd also corresponded, as Gissing drew Clodd's attention to this 'great writer' following the publication of Youth and Two Other Stories (which included Heart of Darkness); see Clodd, Memories, p. 186.

(29) H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, ed. by Patrick Parrinder (1898; London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 13-14.

RICHARD PEARSON

University of Worcester